District 9 is a South African Science fiction movie. Produced by Peter Jackson.

The film has a documentary style feel to it, but not too much to be bothered by it. Though the beginning has a lot of handheld camera shots, the dizzying camera is not applied throughout the whole movie, where some shots are pretty much steady to watch (thankfully! What is up with filming everything in nauseating motion! Quit it!).

PLOT:

A large alien ship stops in orbit above Johannesburg in South Africa in 1982. It is thought a command module must have fallen out (they captured something falling from the shipon camera , but what exactly isn’t sure) and that it is the reason why it stayed. Earthlings go explore, seeing for days no sign had been given from the ship. On board they find a million starving aliens in real bad shape. To treat them, they are given asylum on Earth, in District 9. But soon criminal activities and destruction follow, which is counteracted by security measures by Earth and pretty soon the camp has become a slum.

Now we are in the 21st century, the ship still in orbit, the slum containing too many prawns (nickname for the aliens) and they need to be relocated to a new camp outside of Johannesburg, District 10. This is to be done by the MNU, Multinational United, a private military corporation. The relocation is lead by field operator Wikus van de Merwe, and you guessed it, he pretty much goes into it with enthusiasm, but soon regrets ever having gotten the task…

INTERESTING TO KNOW:

The underlying theme is clearly xenophobia en social segregation. And similarities can be drawn on contemporary refugee camps. The movie is based on a short film Alive in Joburg (2005) (by the same director Neill Blomkamp and produced by the main actor in both films - and very good, I might add - Sharlto Copley) and the name District 9 is inspired by the events that took place in District Six, Cape Town, during the Apartheid. I did not know of this, and was very interested in reading about it. Another reason why I liked District 9, because it made me think and read.

OPINION:

It was nice to see lesser know actors (at least for me as a European - I don't know how known they are in South Africa or elsewhere), because it made the movie have a more realistic feel to it for me. As if it was really an event that happened (although in the future of 2010). It made the "documentary" more realistic to me.

Definitely a movie worth seeing. Sci fi fan or not.

Bande Annonce District 9 trailer 720p
FilmGeek-TV.

A French short movie (his second)by Jacques Rozier .

Zéro de conduite is a French movie by Jean Vigo.

Summer vacation comes to an end and kids need to return to boarding school, a place without much joy and where the teachers don’t need much to punish you. Or, as the title indicates, give you a zero for bad behaviour. 4 amongst them decide to rebel, which the new supervisor turns a blind eye to in order for them to succeed.

On the day of the school feast, they put their rebellion to work by turning the school into complete anarchy. With the 4 rebels on the school roof top.

It’s interesting to see movies from the thirties, where child actors seem to be more themselves than actors.

Nice little movie (it’s a short movie in all).

Worth seeing.

This is a scene taken the episode Special Squad from the BBC sketch comedy series A Bit of Fry and Laurie with Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie.

In this scene, Laurie's eldest son, plays a cameo as a baby in which Fry and Laurie interrogate the baby about "what he's done with the stuff".

I like Fry for his documentaries and QI quiz, for his part as psychiatrist in Bones, as narrator in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe.

And I like Laurie from Blackadder, Stuart Little and very much so from House.

I just hadn't seen A Bit of Fry and Laurie before. I'm going to now, though.

I'm beginning to think that the series The IT Crowd is not htat far off from reality.

(Do you know this series? It's great! Definitely check it out if you haven't.)

Because I feel just like an idiot when I get the reply at work after computer failure: "Have you tried turning it off and on again?". Like that solves the whole problem?!

For weeks now, maybe even longer, I've been experiencing problems with the database at work. My Business Contact Manager isn't managing my contacts for business properly. When I turn my pc on in the morning, it decides whether it is a good day or bad day for it, and then turns off according its mood. And yes, I know i'm humanizing a machine, no, a program. Machines have it in for me. It's clear cut as that.

When finally, I get someone to look at it - not the right person, but close enough - they notice that with restarting the pc, the database becomes accessible again.

Read this with a booming voice of pride and loads of selfesteem:"here you go, you simply need to turn it off and on again and it appears right as rain!" And exit smart guy.

(I would like to take this opportunity, in order not to rub my IT colleagues the wrong way and who I presume will stumble on this post in a near futur, to say how swell you guys are, always there for me, couldn't imagine nicer colleagues then you guys - I'm blaming my post rant on frustration and incapability to sort out this mess, not targetting you guys. Hugs to you all!)

Ok. I admit. The database appeared again. Yet it is still offline. Everything I have encoded in it, is only accessible to me, not to people on the network (a little detail I just noticed today, after weeks of encoding cards). This explains why my boss continuously asks me to look up contact details. I was beginning to think the man was unable to run a database search! But it all comes back to me not having an online database!

Sorry to bore you with IT stuff, but it's just beyond me. This is not productivity. Because you see what has happened?

I've become the database.

I possess the data.

I have access to the data.

And people access me to get to the data.

I'm databasefab ---- INSERT DATA SEARCH HERE ----

bleep bleep bleep

processing

bleep bleep bleep

Another ‘film noir’ to add to the list: Double Indemnity (1944).

This one was directed by Billy Wilder, on which he wrote the screenplay together with Raymond Chandler. This was an adaptation of the novel by James M. Cain (so no, not a Chandler novel).

It stars Fred MacMurray as Walter Neff, Barbara Stanwyck as Phyllis Dietrichsen and Edward G. Robinson (cream of a actor) as Keyes.

PLOT

Insurance salesman Walter Neff, is seen returning to the offices of All-Risk Insurances, seemingly wounded, sits at a desk and starts dictating a confession into a Dictaphone to Keyes.
He confesses how he murdered for a woman (Stanwyck), helping her to plan an accidental death on her husband to claim the insurance. But Keyes, insurance investigation at All-Risk, in charge to pick out the phoney claims from the real ones, senses that the accidental death doesn’t seem so accidental after some closer investigating.

OPINION

What an enjoyable movie! A good pace to the storytelling and damn good actors. Edward G. Robinson is, as I said, a cream of an actor. I liked him in Key Largo as well, FYI Faberadatch-link-KeyLargo. The voice over by the lead character, Neff, is not bothering. Especially because it is not just a voice over to the audience, it is Neff confessing into the Dictaphone to Keyes, so it is interesting to hear him explain how he did it and what he thought at the time.

An excerpt:

I chose one where Edward G. Robinson takes the lead. I like this one a lot. It shows how tenacious he is as an insurance investigator, how witty he is and why he would sense there is something not right in the whole Dietrichson-claim.

Sometimes, you need to get back to the classics. And what is more classic than Humphrey Bogart alongside Lauren Bacall in a 'film noir'? The answer is: nothing. (Possibly another film noir.)

I'm very into film noir. It is a genre that intrigues me, and has for purpose to intrigue, so I'm right on track with that.

The Big Sleep is originally a novel by Raymond Chandler. It’s only after seeing the movie I noticed I had it on my bookshelf. I had once bought a second hand book at university to support a charity cause, with the intent to read it and I never did. (A real shame, cause every book deserves to be read, because that is its purpose of existence.) The book contained 3 novels by Chandler, and the first one is The Big Sleep.

The movie stars Bogart and Bacall in their second movie together, directed by Howard Hawks.

PLOT

Bogart plays private detective Philip Marlowe who is hired by General Sternwood, father of Bacall’s character. The General is being blackmailed for gambling debts of his youngest daughter, Carmen. It seems it was not the first time the General was targeted for blackmail concerning his youngest daughter. Marlowe connects the blackmail case to the sudden disappearance of the Generals much favoured employee. And after meeting the General eldest daughter, her instant dislike to him and meddling attitude to the case, he decides to pursue the family’s case even more. With murder, deceit and love in abundance.

There is a little scene in the bookshop, well actually 2 bookshop scenes, that are fun and playfull. Definitely look out for those.

I admit, the plot is pretty complex. You need to stay focussed or you lose the plot entirely. There is a lot of innuendo, especially in the dialogues by Bogart and Bacall. The witty remarks and dialogues are what make a film noir also so pleasant to watch, because things are never clearly said. The characters are always seizing up how much the other characters really know, or to hide their true intentions. It must be fun to write such stories and figure out ways to hide and be obvious in the intentions expressed like that.

CENSORSHIP

I'm now reading the book and finding, as to be expected, many small differences. Seeing the movie was made in a time where censorship was applied very strictly, the scenes with the naked Carmen was rewritten, the homosexual relationship between Geiger and Lundgren is not mentioned and the pornographic pictures Marlowe finds aren’t mentioned at all.

MISC

While looking at the internet for info on this, I stumbled on things I found interesting. Like the low voice in which Bacall speaks, is actually not her normal tone of voice. She taught herself to speak in a lower tone of voice for her acting. This lead me to the Bogart-Bacall syndrome or BBS, a vocal misuse disorder. It is something common with actors, singers or voice actors who get a hoarse voice as a result of speaking continuously in a low pitched voice.

Here is an excerpt from the movie. Look at how the conversation is packed with innuendo and how the shift in the conversation suddenly takes place, just by the look in Bacall’s eyes. A treat.

At the Cinematek there was a retrospective of Lars Von Trier's work. Which resulted in me seeing a couple of his films successively in September?

The only one I had seen years before was Dancer in the Dark (2000) with Björk and Catherine Deneuve in the lead roles.

Europa (1991) was appealing from the first moment you heard Max Von Sydow’s hypnotizing voice. Situated in the post- Second World War, the character of Jean-Marc Barr (I only knew from Luc Besson’s The Big Blue), is an American from German decent who comes back to Germany to work there and show that it is. As a night train operator at Zentropa, he is put in a politically sensitive position where is is used by different people for different gains.

Idioterne (1998) is very different to Europa, and though it is considered the second dogma film of the Dogme95 movement, it does not entirely follow the dogma rules to the letter. It is shot in documentary style, about a group of people who want to release the inner idiot against the establishment. Sometimes a difficult film to see people cross the boarders of decency, but the end is worthwhile.

Antichrist (2009) is the most recent of the films I saw, seeing it just got out in the cinema. I was warned it would be a shocking movie, and the warnings were valid. Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe are a couple that suffer from the loss of their son. The child fell through the window while they were making love and Gainsbourg’s character cannot deal with the pain and loss of the boy. Dafoe suggest to go to the depths of her fears in order to help her through her pain and anxieties by going to the place she fears the most, the forrest where she worked on her thesis the summer before. It all goes mental from there on. Not a movie for the sensitive ones. I was shocked by 2 specific scenes, of which one I wasn’t brave enough to even watch. I admit it.

Breaking the Waves (1996) is the last one I saw, about an Irish girl that falls in love and marries an oil rig worker. She is so obsessively in love with him, that she cannot take the long absences from home because of his work on the rig. She prays to God to bring him back to her, after which he gets into a serious accident which paralyzes him. She feels so guilty, she’d do anything to keep close to him and make him happy. Even when he urges her to have sex with other men…

One thing you cannot deny is how Von Trier can seemingly make a movie in any style. I admire that. Though it is a bit obvious that women in his movies, whenever they try to do good, seem to turn to evil or end up terribly.

Hi! Sorry for the long absence.

I was on holiday and access to pc's and Internet were very limited (as ought to be on holiday), cause it's outside that the action should be when travelling.

I'm back from Germany, Croatia and even a short stop in Bosnia & Herzegovina. But that is for another post. This is just a signal of life throughout the blogosphere.

I'm going to get some sleep after all those different airports, beds, busses, trains and endless walking on pebble beaches (and yes those are my feet - do not feel free to comment, thank you) ...

If you want to know what I visited last year on vacation, follow this link. Maybe not very travel guide-like, but those where my experiences last year in Croatia. This year was very different to that vacation, though.

Till soon!

I was a bit surprised when I had heard that the next Tarantino would be a war movie of the 40's. Yesterday I went to see it (at an in my mind ridiculous price for a movie ticket!!!) and I must admit, I liked it.... except for the scalping part, but hey, I'm girlish like that.

To me, it seemed like a well written war movie (though I did detect some debatable elements – but after discussing that with a colleague we agreed that for continuity and story purposes they were valid).

What surprised me is that the languages were so diverse. The Germans spoke German, the French spoke French and the Americans, of course, English. Why surprised? Well, I was under the impression that in the US, it is not that much appreciated to be reading subtitling. A foreign movie is not, for that reason, broadly seen, as I’ve heard (though this has gone through some changes). In Europe, and I can only speak for me in Belgium - and for that mainly the Flemish part - we are used to see movies in original languages, subtitled and are, as you can say, trained in reading subtitles quickly. So much can be lost in a translation. So when you can hear the subtleties of a language, it gives a lot more to the performance, no?

And here, in Inglorious Bastards, you picked up the cultural differences and attitudes through the use of language alone: the stiff upper lip of the English, the layed-back attitude of the Americans, the strictness of the Germans and the boldness of the French. Of course, not so stereotypically shown as I have written it, but you saw the nuances which define a culture and identity.

And the fact that throughout the movie there were a lot of switches between all languages (at some point even Italian – a fun scene that one!), made it for me even more interesting. (Have I mentioned I’m a language aficionada?)

If you can find Mike Myers in the movie, then you are good. I’m not saying anything more, but his performance is a nice one. Pronunciation: well studied.

Tarantino features in it twice, but so fast that I didn’t see him. My colleague had to tell me the day after the viewing where he was briefly seen.

Now what made this movie so pleasing for me was the lesser known actors. Yes, it had Brad Pitt in it, and Diane Kruger. But to me there was an actor that was a revelation: Christoph Waltz. He played Standartenführer Hans Landa aka "The Jew Hunter". In my mind, this character carries this movie, no doubt about it. The actor intrigued me: he spoke so perfectly German, English, French and Italian, which I began to doubt which one was his native tongue! (He’s Austrian). And his preformance was charismatic, frightning, hatefull and likeable ... No wonder he received the Best Actor Award at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. Very well earned, I say!

Go on and see Inglorious Bastards. Fan or no fan of Tarantino, it is a good war movie. A bit different from what we are used to with Tarantino, and for that I like it to. A director that doesn’t diversifies, is not a risk taker. And isn’t that the whole point of directing?

Another thing we discussed after the movie, is how in the trailer some images are shown that feature not in the movie. Some small shots that you immediately await when you recognize the scene and once it passed you go "hey, where did that shot go from the trailer?"... I let you watch and check it out for yourself.